Bitcoins appeared in 2009; since then, their number has grown due to mining, and some have gone into oblivion on wallets to which their owners have lost access. How many bitcoins are in circulation in the world at the moment, and what is their total value in traditional currency? Let’s try to understand and make calculations.
Emission of bitcoin
The supply of bitcoin is limited. The source code of this cryptocurrency assumes that no more than 21 million bitcoins can be issued in total. Many tokens initially limit the maximum emission size.
There are several reasons for this.
The cryptocurrency creators sought to ensure that it did not have the shortcomings inherent in traditional money. One of them is depreciation. If you initially designate the maximum possible number of coins, their value will not fall but will increase.
The rising value of bitcoins should encourage miners to keep mining them. Despite the decreasing reward and the laboriousness of this process, bitcoin adherents are still engaged in mining to this day.
Bitcoins are mined gradually. The entire market knows how many bitcoins have been unearthed in the world today. This data is published on aggregator resources such as CoinMarketCap. At the time of writing (January 26, 2022) for Bitcoin, this figure was 18,940,462 BTC.
Bitcoin mining
Satoshi Nakamoto is considered the creator of bitcoin. At that time, the value and mechanism of operation of cryptocurrencies were new and incomprehensible to many. The first bitcoin transactions were made to explore these possibilities. So, in 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanech bought a pizza for 10,000 bitcoins. Now, this is a fantastic amount. If in 2009 1309 BTC were given for $1, then in November 2021, bitcoin was traded at 67.5 thousand dollars apiece.
The rate of cryptocurrency mining decreases over time for several reasons.
The first is the self-regulation of the mining system. If the total power of computing equipment in the network grows, then the complexity of the task automatically increases. Therefore, mining is constantly becoming more expensive, and the calculation of the code for one block is not accelerating.
The second reason is the bitcoin halving, that is, the reduction of mining rewards by half. The decrease in payments occurs every four years. In the early days of bitcoin, a miner received 50 bitcoins for each block. And before the first halving, about 10.5 million bitcoins were mined.
As a result of the last halving in 2020, the reward was reduced to 6.25 BTC. In 2024, it will be 3.125 bitcoins and so on. In total, developers have planned 32 halvings. 900 BTC per day – how many bitcoins were mined worldwide in 2021. Analysts have calculated that it will take about 119 years to mine the remaining coins. And this is even though almost 90% of bitcoins have already been mined.
Lost coins
Unlike traditional currency, cryptocurrency cannot be blocked, frozen, or arrested. However, there are other ways to withdraw digital coins from circulation.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the first cryptocurrency, mined about 1.1 million bitcoins. This money has never been in circulation, although about 6% of all bitcoins are currently issued. According to analysts at Chainalysis, no transactions have been made with approximately 3.5 million bitcoins in the last ten years. We can say that they are also not in circulation.
There are other lost bitcoins. Many creators of cryptocurrencies practice the so-called burning of tokens. They are transferred to wallets for which there are no available private keys. Bitcoins are leaving circulation after hacking exchanges and hacker attacks. In addition, losing the key to a cryptocurrency wallet is equivalent to losing access to funds. Without it, coins cannot be used for exchange, purchases, or transfer to another user. No one can use them, although they continue to reside in the Bitcoin network formally. One can only guess how many coins in the world have been lost at the moment.
According to The New York Times, about 20% of bitcoins are in wallets, the keys that are unavailable or lost. The value of these coins at the current rate exceeds $140 billion. Cane Island Alternative Advisors estimates that about 1,500 bitcoins are lost every day. The head of the company, Timothy Peterson, is confident that there will never be more than 14 million bitcoins in circulation. In addition, since no more than 900 coins are mined daily, the supply will only decrease over time.
Logically, such forecasts should raise the value of the most popular cryptocurrency against an alleged shortage. In 2020 and 2021, this hypothesis was confirmed as the bitcoin price grew like an avalanche. Therefore, many analysts are confident that investing in bitcoin is still profitable in the long run. You can buy bitcoins on exchanges or online exchangers such as Mine.
How much are all bitcoins in the world
Knowing the current price of any cryptocurrency, you can calculate how much all the coins in circulation are worth. This indicator is called market capitalization. It is tracked for each token in real time on major portals such as CoinMarketCap. At the end of January 2022, the value of all mined bitcoins was about 684 billion US dollars.
Summary
To answer the question “How many bitcoins exist in the world?” three quantities are needed: the maximum possible issue of bitcoin, the number of coins mined at the moment, and the number of bitcoins that have been lost or withdrawn from circulation.
The maximum possible emission of bitcoins is embedded in the source code of this cryptocurrency and is 21 million coins.
Bitcoin mining slows down over time. The mining process becomes more difficult automatically with an increase in the equipment’s total capacity, and the miners’ reward is halved every four years. So, in the first four years of the existence of the cryptocurrency, 10.5 million bitcoins were mined, and now the speed does not exceed 900 BTC per day.
At the moment, about 18.9 million BTC have been mined. However, some of these coins are in wallets; the keys are lost.
According to analysts, about 1,500 BTC are withdrawn from circulation every day, so the total number of available bitcoins will never exceed 14 million.
